I’m always a bit wary of new laws, since they often introduce more problems than they solve.  However, I could get behind this one:

As your attorney, I advise you to lay off those french fries.

That’s the message from state Rep. Corbin Van Arsdale, a Houston-area lawmaker who has drafted legislation that would bar fast-food-loving plaintiffs from winning legal judgments after they get fat.

“This basically is supposed to shield folks who sell food or raise animals that are made into food … from having to defend themselves against lawsuits … over obesity claims from overeating,” said Van Arsdale, R-Tomball.

The idea that someone should be able to sue a restaurant or a food maker for getting fat is asinine.  People have choices in what they eat.  It’s not like McDonald’s is jacking people on the street and shoving super-sized Big Mac combo meals down their throats.

I’ve got an old Homelite gas-powered string trimmer that I decided to try to bring back to life.  It was running when I put it away, but it was very hard to start, since the pull rope wouldn’t retract correctly.  I recently found the Homelite parts supplier and ordered the rope, spring, and spool components for the starter.

What’s interesting is that the pull rope came in a plastic bag that was marked “Made in United States, Packaged in Mexico.”  That one caused me to do a double-take for a second.  It’s just a bit of rope. Wouldn’t it be cost prohibitive to ship rope from the US to Mexico to have it put in packages?

I guess they can ship it down there in spools and then cut and package it, but it just seems weird.  You’d think the shipping costs in both directions would eat up any savings in labor.

In reference to my earlier posting on alcohol and children, I recalled that Kim du Toit had once done a rant on the subject.  I seem to recall him mentioning how the issue is approached in Europe, with some places serving special “kid’s drinks.”  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything using his site search capability, so I went to Google. 

I still haven’t found the article, but this sponsored link had me laughing, as my brain interpreted it the wrong way at first.  Something in my mixed up wiring saw this as recipes to be used when preparing children, not recipes for children to use.

The human mind is a wonderous and dangerous thing…

I’m always getting mixed up about which area codes around here are truly local and which are long distance.  It doesn’t really matter from a cost perspective for me, since I’ve got the Verizon Freedom plan and don’t pay per-minute charges any more.  The problem is that I’ll dial a number with the ‘1’ and the phone system will tell me I don’t need it, or I’ll dial it without the ‘1’ and it’ll tell me I need it.

But that got me to thinking.  If the system knows enough to tell me that the number needs a ‘1’ or not, why not just complete the damn call?

Although I’ve not had a lot of time for posting, I’m still having to fiddle behind the scenes to keep this site free of spam. 

Every couple of days some gomer with a zombie farm hits the old Movable Type installation with a bunch of poker trackback spams.  They don’t last any longer than it takes for me to smite them with MT Blacklist, but it’s still annoying to deal with.

However, this morning I noticed a new and more insidious form of comment spam.  Someone hit the EE weblog with comments that included links to weird spamlike Blogspot domains, which included numbers in the names.  Given the way EE’s Blacklist works, these don’t seem to get filtered, even if I add the domains to the Blacklist.  I’m not sure why.  Luckily there weren’t many of them and I deleted them within minutes of them being added.  I did find it slightly ironic, however, that one of the entries that got hit was about Spamming Bastards.

The other thing that seems to show up a lot lately are referral spams.  I’ve shut down most of them by blacklisting their common keywords and domains, but I discovered an ingenious new form of referral spam today.  Instead of directly putting their domain into the referral (which was getting them blacklisted or shut down) they put a Google search with their keywords in there.  This way it makes it look like someone landed on my weblog using those search terms.  Anyone hitting my referral page will see those search terms, and if they click on the referrer will land on a Google search page that highlights the spammer’s sites.  It’s an indirect Googleback referrer spam. 

I’ve removed them by blocking their keywords (somehow I don’t see a legitimate need for me to get referrals for “trixieteen” or similar nonsense). 

I decided to do my taxes this afternoon to get it out of the way.  Sometimes, especially on Sundays, I keep Discovery Channel or the History Channel on as mildly interesting background noise.  The History Channel was running a show on the mob and it struck me that the reason the government comes down so hard on them is that they don’t like the competition with regards to shakedown rackets. 

Anyhow, another thing that caught my attention was the selection of commercials that they were running.  I had noticed this last Sunday during MythBusters on Discovery, and it struck me again today.  It seems like running ads for Levitra and Cialis during Sunday afternoon on Discovery Channel and the History Channel is inappropriate at best.  I’ve always seen Discovery and the History Channel as being safe for kids.  If I had kids I’d hate to have to explain the concept of “erectile quality.”  For that matter, who would have ever thought that we’d even find that phrase outside of a medical study or textbook?

I just finished squeezing three weeks of work into a two week bag and I feel like something my dog dragged home and threw up on the carpet.  Anyhow, it doesn’t help that I had a cleaning and adjustment to my braces yesterday.  If you hear your dentist tell the ortho assistant to “ligate” something, you should know that it means little wires are tied from the bracket to the main wire.  In this case, whatever verbiage she said after the word “ligate” also meant crank the bejeezus out of the tie wire such that the patient’s head feels like it was put in a vice the next day.  Although they did warn me to take some Advil when I got home to get a head start on it.

It turned out that the bug that hit me the other day wasn’t the flu, which was good, but some sort of mutant cold-type thing.  It has affected my energy level and I haven’t really felt like saying anything on here.  In the meantime, though, I’ve been tinkering around behind the scenes.  I upgraded Expression Engine (as noted below) and installed the NoFollow and Acronym plugins.  I briefly considered this plugin as well, but ultimately decided against it (Argh!).

NoFollow automatically adds ‘rel=“nofollow”’ to URLs in the comments and trackbacks, which will cause Google to ignore those links for ranking purposes.  That, in turn, will eventually take the “profit” out of comment and trackback spam, since their main goal is to drive links to their sites to increase their page ranking.

The Acronym plugin compares your text against its internal list of known acronyms and highlights them on the page.  I’ve added some common ones that weren’t already included, but that would be encountered on my site.  That should reduce the user’s frustration level below the MAF when I mention NRA, GOA, TSRA, or dealing with silly CHL rules put in place by GFW’s.

I also installed MT-Blacklist on the old Movable Type installation to make despamming trackbacks easier.  I don’t use MT anymore, but The Bitch Girls site does, so I couldn’t just remove the trackback CGI module. 

It seems those scumsucking bastard spammers have sunk to a new low.  Up to now they’ve been spamming comments and referrers.  This morning I found about 50 emails in my inbox from trackback notifications where the bastards have spammed both this Expression Engine weblog and the old Movable Type one.  It appears that I’m going to have to go back and edit every single item individually to get rid of these trackbacks… 

What a way to start the day. 

Update:  Upgrading to EE 1.2.1 and adding the two URL’s used by the spammer to my blacklist made all of the offending trackbacks go away with one click of the mouse.  That sure was a lot easier than the spams that I had to delete from the MT weblog (where I had to go into each entry one-at-a-time and delete the trackbacks). 

I’ve got ‘bots crawling all over me and they’re leaving some nasty slime.

I was trying to discover how the guy who commented on the Ft. Worth zoo got to my site so I took at look at my referrers for Friday.  Expression Engine has a blacklist that you can download from their central servers to keep out most referrer spam, but they still show up in the raw logs.  There is some nasty stuff in there (this is the output of a script that breaks up the Apache logs and shows only external referrals (e.g. removes any internal referrals from one page to another within the site)):


“http://sexnotes.net/handjob-galleries.php” ==> /index.php?/orglog/C24/
“http://sexnotes.net/handjob-pics.php” ==> /index.php?/orglog/C24/
“http://sexnotes.net/handjob-mpeg.php” ==> /index.php?/orglog/C24/
“http://sexnotes.net/hetero-handjobs.php” ==> /index.php?/orglog/C24/
“http://sexnotes.net/handjob-videos.php” ==> /index.php?/orglog/C24/
“http://sexnotes.net/handjob-movies.php” ==> /index.php?/orglog/C24/
“http://sexnotes.net/handjobs.php” ==> /index.php?/orglog/C24/
“http://sexnotes.net/russian-femdom.php” ==> /index.php?/orglog/C24/
“http://12.163.72.13/” ==> /index.php?/orglog/comments/542/
“http://books.livenet.pl” ==> /
“http://12.163.72.13/” ==> /index.php?/orglog/trackbacks/841/
“http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=gun+show+dfw&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&ei=UTF-8” ==> /gunshows
“http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=gun+show+dfw&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&ei=UTF-8” ==> /gunshows/
“http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=kimber+armory” ==> /armory/index.php?/armory/gun_entry/kimber_ultra_cdp_ii/
“http://www.google.com/ie?q=dallas+gun+show&hl=en&lr=” ==> /gunshows/
“http://drugsbook.com/vigrx.php” ==> /index.php?/orglog/C24/
“http://drugsbook.com/vigorelle.php” ==> /index.php?/orglog/C24/
“http://drugsbook.com/vigrx-oil.php” ==> /index.php?/orglog/C24/
“http://bontril.allwords.info” ==> /index.php?/orglog/C24/
“http://bontril.allwords.info/bontril-35mg.php” ==> /index.php?/orglog/C24/
“http://bontril.allwords.info/bontril-35mg.php” ==> /index.php?/orglog/C24/
“http://bontril.allwords.info/buy-bontril.php” ==> /index.php?/orglog/C24/
“http://bontril.allwords.info/buy-bontril.php” ==> /index.php?/orglog/C24/


Most of those didn’t get through, but some of them did because I hadn’t updated the blacklist in a while.  Of the 4182 referrers on Friday, 1315 were from “sexnotes.net”, 1351 were from “allwords.info”, and 676 were from “drugsbook.com.”  In fact, a quick scan of the logs shows only about 300 valid referrers (Google searches, weblog referrers, etc). 

But then my problems are small compared to what Little Green Footballs has to deal with.